10 reasons why politics is a waste of time

You don’t drain the swamp — the swamp drains you. The system swallows everyone whole, even someone as audacious as Trump.

To get elected, you need support. To get support you need to make promises, which often will include statist actions.

You need funding. People only donate big money if they will see a financial benefit, which usually involves a government privilege.

Even small money makes you more susceptible to pressure, because it’s harder to say “no” to someone who has given you money, even if they want a statist policy.

You have to get along with people: candidates, bureaucrats, civil organizations, unions, the media, voters, etc. That means not rocking the boat. Avoiding hard truths. Not being unpleasant. It’s hard to get the truth out this way. It’s like trying to put out a burning building with your hands tied behind your back.

Every small compromise leads to a bigger compromise, and so on, until you are fully coopted into the system. If you accept the premise that a little bit of statist action is okay as long as your end goal is the removal of a bigger statist action, you will never be able to see that you are being coopted. In your mind, you are fighting the good fight, but in reality you are merely doing the work of the state, with a fun, but hypocritical, marketing plan.

Look at the opportunity cost of doing politics. How effective is electoral politics, versus media or business? Lots of energy spent for meager results.

If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Politics is dirty and savage. The people in it are assholes. If you get into the game, you have to play hard to win. That means eventually you have to become as nasty and back-stabbing as your competitors. How can you avoid it? By buttering everyone’s bread and going along to get along, i.e. statism.

Winning is losing. If you win office, you take a salary funded by taxpayers. That is inherently unethical. If you forego the salary, you have to make it up otherwise. If someone funds you, then you are beholden to them, which usually means statism. If you are independently wealthy, then politics is an awful waste of your time. You’d be better off buying professional politicians, than being one yourself. Focus on making more money and funding media and tech ventures to benefit the liberty movement.

Why hasn’t electoral politics tended to increased liberty, but only increased statism? What fundamental change will happen to reverse this trend? Politics is structured to produce an increase in state power. The simple act of being “in power” demands that one exercise power. If one’s only agenda is to refrain from using power, one will not have it for very long, as someone else will take it. Seeking power to restrain power is a performative contradiction.

The globalization of politics

Something is different in politics recently. No, not Trump. I mean the global nature of previously domestic politics. In the past, there was a superficial awareness of geopolitics and foreign leaders. But now we have the same emotional, visceral response to other countries’ politicians, that used to be reserved for one’s own. Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, Merkel, Wilders, Orban, Erdogan — have supporters and detractors across the world. There even seem to be the rough outlines of political alignment across boundaries, such as Nigel Farage stumping for Trump.

Social media has certainly contributed to this globalization of discourse. But there is a narrative structure to recent events. A disaffected, right-wing, populist, global “revolution” against the “establishment” is a unifying thread. Both sides of the political spectrum are engaging in cross-border alignments. Is there a deliberate unite-and-rule tactic happening, to drive us into yet another false, left-right paradigm? This time, it is pushing our consciousness to operate on the global level, rather than the national.

We are to believe that there is suddenly a groundswell of opposition to global governance, simultaneously, worldwide. This opposition is momentarily winning, but it is painted in the darkest terms, as something that must be defeated. Perhaps it is just one phase of the dialectic, to get us psychologically prepared for global governance.

Just as with national politics, there is a danger in engaging this new global politics. It is putting our faith, hope, time and energy into these pantheonic figures, completely removed from our lives, which might as well be cartoon characters on a screen. We ignore the local, the immediate, the personal. We should not buy into these false alignments and alliances, as if they are our saviors — a grand revolution around the world.

Twitterspeak: the shrinkage of language

Twitter is altering language, not just on Twitter, but across all media. Everything is being compactified; short attention spans demand it. Among the benefits are brevity, efficiency, and impact. The downside is the destruction of nuance and precision. Dropped indefinite articles, sentence fragments, and an explosion of abbreviations and acronyms. The danger is a form of Newspeak, in which a decrease in expressiveness of language yields a constricting of thought itself.

Will our capacity for conceptualization be limited to the lowest common denominator or will this punchy format lead to communicating new ideas that otherwise would have collected dust in long-form academic essays?

Trump split libertarians

The Trump phenomenon has splintered the libertarian movement into three distinct groups. The massive political realignment taking place has exposed fractures that have existed for a long time. How will these factions reconcile and will they constitute a unified movement in the future?

Left-libertarians – Typically DC beltway libertarians and wannabe respectable types. The biggest of the three groups, they are best represented by Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson. They value left social issues and are animated by anti-racism, gay marriage, and baking of cakes. They also think Trump is racist and hates women. Any good that may come from Trump’s challenge of the establishment is overshadowed by his being Pure Evil.

Paleo-conservatives – People like Lew Rockwell and Jeff Deist. They value nationalism and traditional right views on culture, immigrants, and political correctness. There is a silver lining to every one of Trump’s totalitarian or economically destructive proposals.

Voluntarists – The smallest faction, with people like Robert Wenzel and James Corbett. They see Trump as not much different from Hillary or any of the other candidates, and a potential disaster for the country and the libertarian brand. They tend to point out both the good aspects and terrible aspects of Trump’s proposals.